Michael Meskes: > I'd like to ask the other developers what they think. I guess I'm repeating myself, but oh well. In my opinion, the main Debian distribution (i.e., not including non-free or contrib) should consist only of free software, where the definition of free includes the requirement that source code is available and that the program does not depend in a significant manner on a non-free package, whether the dependency is during compilation, installation or use. XForms is not free (no source). Anything that uses XForms is not free, because you can't compile it without XFree. All the installer packages likewise. And *-?motif packages. If a package is otherwise free, but depends on non-free, it should go to contrib. > behind your approach I still think LyX should be an official part of Debian. That would be great, but as long as it depends on non-free stuff, it should go in contrib. > What happens if I recompile it statically? Would it go into the standard > tree then? As far as I'm concerned, no. That just moves the dependency to another point in time, and additionally causes trouble for users. We need to have complete source code so that we can port packages to new platforms, or to new tools or libraries. I'm sure XForms is nice, but is there a version of the Alpha? For glibc? For newest XFree shared libraries? For gcc with pentium patches? With profiling support? Placing a package in non-free or contrib isn't discriminatory, it's just honesty and makes it possible for people to choosing packages more easily. I'm all for having LyX packaged for Debian, and XForms too, but we aren't helping the user by putting it into the main distribution. -- Lars Wirzenius <liw@iki.fi> <http://www.iki.fi/liw/> Please don't Cc: me when replying to my message on a mailing list.
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